I rock away my loneliness in a hammock behind our new rental, with its unpacked boxes, its knotty pine cabinets, its old trees in the yard. My eyes find the sky through the akimbo limbs and strangled wires left by the power company, their butchery proof of effort. They say, you can’t sue us now.
It is fire season in earthquake country. Here, we are subject to change without warning. Not prepared, exactly. But never shocked. Destruction is inevitable, but so too is the victory of the trees and grasses, hawks and hares, the endless invasions of coyotes. Our stalemate continues.
I’m too tired to swim. Out here in the deep shadows, pool and sky multiply oblongs of opal, watched over by push-upping lizards. I would have to skim the endless blades of ficus, flitting without pause since the hardhat men gave the hedge her cheap haircut. It’s loud out here, the telephone wires shimmering with bird blare. I think I like it. The air is warm, and smells faintly of the skunks burrowing below the fig tree, their holes blacker places in the dark underneath.
Next door tenants slam the dumpster all day, informing us that if anyone on our side fails to be respectful, they’ll smoke their bud near the cinderblocks, blow cloudbanks of dank across the crumbling wall. I'm not afraid. The stink is a sticky comfort. It reminds me of my childhood.
Around the block, I greet everyone, the glowering, bald cell phone bro, the lumbering housecoat lady, and the trucker-cap gal with her toddler who proclaims his name, Cali, Cali Cali.
Yes, babe. You are here. We’re lucky to share this land, with the spreading oaks and midnight coyote cacophony, the pitted pastel cliffsides swooping with swallows. So long as we make rent.
The sign on the neighbors’ facade reads Country Club Apartments. But if you look carefully behind the crested palmettos, there rests the chiaroscuro of a disco-era font spelling Royal Scandia. Someone leaves Korean cigarette packs crumpled on the sidewalk below, their gold foil a tribute to past pleasures.
Whoever Royal Scandia was, she left glamorous evidence the landlords can’t chisel off, decorative concrete blocks throwing quatrefoil silhouettes on the pavement, chained pendant lamps ambering the stairwell like caged jewels. She was magnificent in her willingness to try, the splendor she promised and probably, for a time, delivered. But that is decades past, now, evidence only visible to those still looking for the double identity, the past self, the new version, and soon the one to come, that disregards them both. Even the palmetto has been cut away and regrown, carelessly, plumage odd and irregular, but never mind. She is lovely because she is still here, growing around the scar of herself.
Circling the block, I watch the S peel away, day by day, until only Royal ‘andia remains. Then one Friday in October, the unpacked boxes are loaded again, and just like every human person who has moved through this rough paradise, I am gone.
Lisa Loop (MFA UCR/PD) is a poet and author with a background in film. Her work has been published in NBC.com/THINK, The Coachella Review, Kelp Journal, Ballast Journal, 34th Parallel Magazine, HerStry, 801 Literary, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their Aussie Shephard mix. One day she hopes to rent a house in the Baltic and spend all summer there, writing, hunting for mushrooms, and watching the sky stay perpetually light.
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